This paper addresses the challenge of handling extreme class imbalance, defined here as a situation in which negative examples, conventionally the majority, outnumber positive examples, usually the ones of most interest, by a factor of 500 or more (in other words, have an imbalance ratio (IR) 500). Such problems are not in fact uncommon, and arise in application areas such as fraud detection [1] and cheminformatics [2]. We make use of two methods, that tackle different, but complementary, aspects of the class imbalance problem: ASTra, a novel, adaptive, asymmetric output layer activation function, which makes the correct classification of minority examples easier. A loss function based on an approximated confusion matrix, which aggressively targets the misclassification of minority examples. Our proposed methods have the advantage of being easy to implement and integrate into the workflow of any model that makes binary predictions normally generated by a sigmoid activation (transfer) function. In addition, the paper presents a new means of monitoring training and validation performance, especially valuable in cases of high class imbalance, that could potentially be used with any training regime, independently of the proposed methods.

A staple food in more than a hundred nations worldwide is rice (Oryza sativa). The cultivation of rice is vital to global economic growth. However, the main issue facing the agricultural industry is rice leaf disease. The quality and quantity of the crops have declined, and this is the main cause. As farmers in any country do not have much knowledge about rice leaf disease, they cannot diagnose rice leaf disease properly. That's why they cannot take proper care of rice leaves. As a result, the production is decreasing. From literature survey, it has seen that YOLOv5 exhibit the better result compare to others deep learning method. As a result of the continual advancement of object detection technology, YOLO family algorithms, which have extraordinarily high precision and better speed have been used in various scene recognition tasks to build rice leaf disease monitoring systems. We have annotate 1500 collected data sets and propose a rice leaf disease classification and detection method based on YOLOv5 deep learning. We then trained and evaluated the YOLOv5 model. The simulation outcomes show improved object detection result for the augmented YOLOv5 network proposed in this article. The required levels of recognition precision, recall, mAP value, and F1 score are 90\%, 67\%, 76\%, and 81\% respectively are considered as performance metrics.

Auditing Data Provenance (ADP), i.e., auditing if a certain piece of data has been used to train a machine learning model, is an important problem in data provenance. The feasibility of the task has been demonstrated by existing auditing techniques, e.g., shadow auditing methods, under certain conditions such as the availability of label information and the knowledge of training protocols for the target model. Unfortunately, both of these conditions are often unavailable in real applications. In this paper, we introduce Data Provenance via Differential Auditing (DPDA), a practical framework for auditing data provenance with a different approach based on statistically significant differentials, i.e., after carefully designed transformation, perturbed input data from the target model's training set would result in much more drastic changes in the output than those from the model's non-training set. This framework allows auditors to distinguish training data from non-training ones without the need of training any shadow models with the help of labeled output data. Furthermore, we propose two effective auditing function implementations, an additive one and a multiplicative one. We report evaluations on real-world data sets demonstrating the effectiveness of our proposed auditing technique.

Since its introduction two decades ago, there has been increasing interest in the problem of early classification of time series. This problem generalizes classic time series classification to ask if we can classify a time series subsequence with sufficient accuracy and confidence after seeing only some prefix of a target pattern. The idea is that the earlier classification would allow us to take immediate action, in a domain in which some practical interventions are possible. For example, that intervention might be sounding an alarm or applying the brakes in an automobile. In this work, we make a surprising claim. In spite of the fact that there are dozens of papers on early classification of time series, it is not clear that any of them could ever work in a real-world setting. The problem is not with the algorithms per se but with the vague and underspecified problem description. Essentially all algorithms make implicit and unwarranted assumptions about the problem that will ensure that they will be plagued by false positives and false negatives even if their results suggested that they could obtain near-perfect results. We will explain our findings with novel insights and experiments and offer recommendations to the community.

Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC) is an inherited heart muscle disease that appears between the second and forth decade of a patient's life, being responsible for 20% of sudden cardiac deaths before the age of 35. The effective and punctual diagnosis of this disease based on Electrocardiograms (ECGs) could have a vital role in reducing premature cardiovascular mortality. In our analysis, we firstly outline the digitalization process of paper - based ECG signals enhanced by a spatial filter aiming to eliminate dark regions in the dataset's images that do not correspond to ECG waveform, producing undesirable noise. Next, we propose the utilization of a low - complexity convolutional neural network for the detection of an arrhythmogenic heart disease, that has not been studied through the usage of deep learning methodology to date, achieving high classification accuracy, namely 99.98% training and 98.6% testing accuracy, on a disease the major identification criterion of which are infinitesimal millivolt variations in the ECG's morphology, in contrast with other arrhythmogenic abnormalities. Finally, by performing spectral analysis we investigate significant differentiations in the field of frequencies between normal ECGs and ECGs corresponding to patients suffering from ARVC. In 16 out of the 18 frequencies where we encounter statistically significant differentiations, the normal ECGs are characterized by greater normalized amplitudes compared to the abnormal ones. The overall research carried out in this article highlights the importance of integrating mathematical methods into the examination and effective diagnosis of various diseases, aiming to a substantial contribution to their successful treatment. KEY WORDS: Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy, Arrhythmia diagnosis, ECG, Signal digitalization, Convolutional neural networks, Arrhythmia detection, Spectral analysis 1. Introduction Arrhythmogenic right ventricular cardiomyopathy (ARVC), is an inherited heart muscle disease characterized by fibro-fatty replacement of the right ventricular myocardium that predisposes patients to arrhythmia and right ventricular (RV) dysfunction leading in some cases to sudden cardiac death (SCD) 2

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) represents a slowly progressive disorder that can eventually require renal replacement therapy (RRT) including dialysis or renal transplantation. Early identification of patients who will require RRT (as much as 1 year in advance) improves patient outcomes, for example by allowing higher-quality vascular access for dialysis. Therefore, early recognition of the need for RRT by care teams is key to successfully managing the disease. Unfortunately, there is currently no commonly used predictive tool for RRT initiation. In this work, we present a machine learning model that dynamically identifies CKD patients at risk of requiring RRT up to one year in advance using only claims data. To evaluate the model, we studied approximately 3 million Medicare beneficiaries for which we made over 8 million predictions. We showed that the model can identify at risk patients with over 90% sensitivity and specificity. Although additional work is required before this approach is ready for clinical use, this study provides a basis for a screening tool to identify patients at risk within a time window that enables early proactive interventions intended to improve RRT outcomes.

Many cyberattacks start with disseminating phishing URLs. When clicking these phishing URLs, the victim's private information is leaked to the attacker. There have been proposed several machine learning methods to detect phishing URLs. However, it still remains under-explored to detect phishing URLs with evasion, i.e., phishing URLs that pretend to be benign by manipulating patterns. In many cases, the attacker i) reuses prepared phishing web pages because making a completely brand-new set costs non-trivial expenses, ii) prefers hosting companies that do not require private information and are cheaper than others, iii) prefers shared hosting for cost efficiency, and iv) sometimes uses benign domains, IP addresses, and URL string patterns to evade existing detection methods. Inspired by those behavioral characteristics, we present a network-based inference method to accurately detect phishing URLs camouflaged with legitimate patterns, i.e., robust to evasion. In the network approach, a phishing URL will be still identified as phishy even after evasion unless a majority of its neighbors in the network are evaded at the same time. Our method consistently shows better detection performance throughout various experimental tests than state-of-the-art methods, e.g., F-1 of 0.89 for our method vs. 0.84 for the best feature-based method.

This article was published as a part of the Data Science Blogathon. Today we live in a world of active social networking where every kind of information is shared among users worldwide. This is greatly facilitated by the ubiquitousness of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. Some popular sites are Facebook, Whatsapp, LinkedIn, etc.; however, Twitter is a viral microblogging site used worldwide for open information exchange. On Twitter, various types of information are exchanged in the form of short messages that include information regarding any mishaps or accidents happening worldwide.

Hello, happy to see you here. Today let's dive into some popular topics which are often discussed in machine learning interviews. Without further ado, presenting to you the next cheat sheet. But what exactly do we do when we already have data? We will stop on each task separately in detail in next articles.

In recent years, a growing body of work has emerged on how to learn machine learning models under fairness constraints, often expressed with respect to some sensitive attributes. In this work, we consider the setting in which an adversary has black-box access to a target model and show that information about this model's fairness can be exploited by the adversary to enhance his reconstruction of the sensitive attributes of the training data. More precisely, we propose a generic reconstruction correction method, which takes as input an initial guess made by the adversary and corrects it to comply with some user-defined constraints (such as the fairness information) while minimizing the changes in the adversary's guess. The proposed method is agnostic to the type of target model, the fairness-aware learning method as well as the auxiliary knowledge of the adversary. To assess the applicability of our approach, we have conducted a thorough experimental evaluation on two state-of-the-art fair learning methods, using four different fairness metrics with a wide range of tolerances and with three datasets of diverse sizes and sensitive attributes. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach to improve the reconstruction of the sensitive attributes of the training set.